What makes Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter so good?

[5ekyu]

I am legitimately not trying to start any sort of flame war, but these two feats seem hyped way beyond anything I have seen at the table.

+10 damage is good, probably around doubling your damage on a hit (for argument's sake I am assuming 12 or 11 damage on a hit normally), but it comes with a 25% drop in accuracy. The math definitely works out as a net gain, if I hit 3/4 as often but do twice the damage it is definitely a win, but it hardly seems overwhelming.

When I see someone running it at the table it feels very swingy. They are less reliable than other fighter types but they have impressive numbers when they hit. They feel almost like a barbarian in a box but it is not amazing, especially since we play at low enough levels that it works out that anyone who isn't a variant human basically gave up the +2 increase on their primary stat to take it.

At my home game table it is another matter, we use flanking rules and I can count on one hand the number of times a PC has attacked without advantage. In cases like that the penalty is hardly noticeable.

Is everyone always attacking with advantage, or am I missing some other game changing aspect?

2h-10>d
H=how many results on a d20 hit.
D=damage of a hit without a +10.

Thats the math behind the 5/10 feats.

So for instance at h=10 and dmg =10 you break even

Higher h lower d better for the 5/10.

So to get a lot of exyra damage out of it you need really high h and not really high d, which often means putside buffs and advantage.

But it also means it varies a lot by assumptions on enemy defenses. If their ac is high from buffs or their able to get disadvantage on your hit, it again becomes a not good option.

So it is really a circumstantial thing with a lot of assumptions to make it powerful in the excel white room world.

 

[houser2112]

These statements:

Suddenly the miss chance isn't 25%. You will see that a high level fighter will routinely gain 30 points of damage or even more.

don't support this assertion:

The feat is utterly misconstrued, clearly made by a designer inept at min-maxing.

Quite the opposite, in fact. I think the designer was quite good at min-maxing.

 

[TwoSix]

1) The damage bonus scales with the number of attacks you make. Getting lots of attacks and then finding a feature that adds to each attack is the best way to increase damage in 5e.

2) Chunky damage is splashy. Hitting for 20 damage is simply more noticeable than doing 2 hits for 10, despite the fact that 2 hits for 10 is technically better (less overflow damage). Additionally, one big hit tends to get your more kill shots. At low levels, doing 8 points of damage doesn't tend to drop enemies, but an 18 point hit will drop quite a few enemies with CR <1. Splashy and noticeable drive discussions.

3) Advantage is best at when your base hit chance is ~50%. With lower AC enemies, or moderate AC enemies with a little bit of a hit bonus (like bless), you fight an awful lot of encounters with about a 75% hit chance, or 50% with the -5 from GWM/SS. This is obviously purely anecdotal, but as an example, the last 5 combats I've done with my 9th level GWM hexblade, every attack roll I've made has been against an enemy with an AC of either 15, 16, or 17. (I take notes on stuff like this, because I'm a big nerd.) With my +10 to hit, that's a 70-80% hit chance, or a 45-55% chance with the -5/+10.
But with advantage, which is easy to get in my game with flanking rules or using shadow of moil, then it's a 93% chance to do an average 12 point hit or a 75% chance to do 22 damage. It's a massive damage disparity, in situations that are really pretty common and easy to set up.

4) The damage bonus is about equal to an ASI on its own, and GWM and SS both have ancillary features that are pretty great by themselves. Take out the damage bonus, and throw in a +1 to Dex, and I'd still take Sharpshooter on most archer characters. GWM probably would need another throw in, beyond a +1 Str, but a free bonus action every battle or two isn't bad.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Another way to look at its potential is this: It's gaining you the equivalent of an average +3d6 of sneak attack damage (10.5 vs the feat's 10), and you can add it to every single hit you make.

Whereas as we know, the rogue only gets to add his sneak attack to only one of their attacks in their turn. The paladin could also smite for about the same average damage on every attack (+2d8, or 9 points), but their spell slots will get used up pretty quickly doing that, whereas the feat-user can keep going. And in both of these cases, many times the rogue and paladin's bonus damage will be less than average, which in a lot of ways makes the feat-user's set damage result more enticing than a random one.

There are a lot of reasons why certain tables find these feats too good balance-wise versus other options-- both in terms of other feats to take, but also versus what other PCs are capable of doing in the group. For high DPR tables, those classes that fall behind can fall really far behind, and it can make their contributions in combat almost negligible. Which if you are a high DPR, big combat type of table playstyle, it will probably cause issues over the long term.

Other styles of table? Probably not as noticeable. And you can consider yourself lucky, as you can use these feats as the fun options they were designed to be. Other tables don't have that luck.

 

[jgsugden]

It assumes that advantage is rare.

However, people under estimate the risks. Most of the time it gives you a huge advantage and you takemfoes down faster. However, every once in a while, the negatives of the feat catch you back to back to back... and that gives your foe a chance to take you down. You might take down 15 foes faster, but if the 16th gets more time to take you down, you're losing out. The monsters we face only have to try to survive one encounter... PCs want to survive them all. A feat that makes it more likely that you'll fall in combat once in a while is a risky thing. You can mock up a battle in a spreadsheet and repeat it a few hundred thousand times and see that the risk of death rises in many situations with this feat.

Also, people underestimate how often the feat has no true net impact ... or a pure negative one. If you do 12 or 22 damage on your first strike and the enemy has 23 hps, you're likely to require 2 hits to kill it regardless of whether you used the feat or not... so using the feat would have been all negative. Overkill reduces the benefit quite a bit.

Still a good feat. Still worth having... but people underestimate the risks.

 

[Vymair]

For Great Weapon Master, it's not only the -5/+10, it is also the extra attack as a bonus action if you drop a monster or critical. The ability to generate extra attacks is very nice.

Both feats are very good in hands of experienced players who can quickly assess likely armor classes of their foes. At my table, we have several people who have played D&D for decades and are quite analytical, so the benefits from these feats is even larger that the straight math would indicate. Additionally, if you have ways to generate advantage as a party, these feats are even more effective. Faerie Fire anyone?

 

[houser2112]

I don't have any experience with GWM, but quite a bit with SS. As others have said, it's easy to mitigate the accuracy penalty with your own class features, externally applied buffs, and situational advantage to turn the feat into a pure damage boost. Even so, the damage boost is gravy on top of the meat which is the range and cover penalty mitigation. The feat would be worth taking for those alone, it could be debated. With the damage boost, it's a no-brainer.

 

[CapnZapp]

2h-10>d
H=how many results on a d20 hit.
D=damage of a hit without a +10.

Thats the math behind the 5/10 feats.

So for instance at h=10 and dmg =10 you break even

Higher h lower d better for the 5/10.

So to get a lot of exyra damage out of it you need really high h and not really high d, which often means putside buffs and advantage.

But it also means it varies a lot by assumptions on enemy defenses. If their ac is high from buffs or their able to get disadvantage on your hit, it again becomes a not good option.

So it is really a circumstantial thing with a lot of assumptions to make it powerful in the excel white room world.

If you think you can disprove its real life performance in actual play with your spurious math, think again.

 

[CapnZapp]

These statements:

don't support this assertion:


Quite the opposite, in fact. I think the designer was quite good at min-maxing.

If you mean "if I'm able to sneak this in under the nose of Mearls, I'm totally gonna dominate combat with my characters" then yes, have a laugh point.

 

[iserith]

Okay, that's just awesome. Extremely flavorful, effective in an unusual way, effective in a way that helps everyone in the party shine so everyone gets spotlight. Bravo!

Funny aside, I joined a campaign with this character a few months back and the DM actually had to look up whether Sharpshooter applied to the weapons I was using it on - everyone else in her games only took bows!

I tend to think that when players intentionally invest resources like a feat into a specific type of action, they intend to use that action. The player decided upfront they wanted that to be part of their character's main shtick.

The missing a lot surprises me - when I played one if we encountered foes I hadn't fought before I would fire a few shots without the -5 first so I could judge "hey, I hit on an 8 on the die" or "I missed on a 13 on the die" before deciding to activate it or not.

That said, party synergy often had me Blessed and other buffs, or debuffs on foes (monk stun, spells) so that missing was rare against common opponents.

Now, the only time I played a SS was in the Giants module, so we knew that our most common opponents would be giant bags of HPs that would need to be whittled down otherwise combats would last forever. Very little overkill over the course of a combat, need to do great damage otherwise the giants would be able to wear us down every single time. That might not be the standard for a normal campaign.

Even so, I would do other actions. Spike Growth was one of my favorites to discourage giants from closing with the squishier members of the party (including me).

Players in my games, for whatever reason, tend to do pretty awesome stuff. My experience is that when someone just focuses on "I do lots of damage with this one weapon..." they find they aren't as memorable as the other characters and buyer's remorse sets in. Nobody remember how much damage you do turn by turn. They remember all the other cool stuff that stands out. At least, that's my experience. In my Delve campaign, for example, the Dex-fighter sharpshooter Gil Brightwood is remembered for taking down the corrupt mayor who colluded with the villain and becoming mayor himself. (That and getting a highly unlikely roll of a +2 bow on a random treasure hoard.) His body count in the dungeon is just a footnote, if that.

I also benefit from having a player pool in my campaigns - more players than seats in a particular session. This means multiple players who in turn have more than one character, so any given session can see a change-up in both players and party composition. A Sharpshooter PC might have other PCs in the group that can buff his or her chances to hit, but it's also likely that he or she may not.